California Whitewater Rafting -or- California Zip Lines from Coastal Oil Rig to Coastal Oil Rig? Maybe we can look forward to both?

We’re back to that same ‘ol argument… drilling for oil in unspoiled, wild places to remedy our oil issues. 

Despite the fact that there are already 68 million acres of public lands and waters open for drilling, the current administration (and dare I say their Big Oil Cohorts) want to lift the ban on offshore oil drilling.

I checked in with the folks at the Wilderness Society about what’s happening in Alaska, particularly the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and they had this to say:

As gas prices skyrocket, Congress is under increasing pressure to find a quick fix to our national addiction to oil. Together, the oil industry, the Bush Administration and the Republican leadership have raised the prospect of drilling our way out of this energy crisis—and have touted the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge as our answer to energy independence.
 
What they don’t say is that if we were to drill in the Refuge tomorrow, there would be no effect on gas prices today. The oil speculated to be in the Arctic Refuge would lower gas prices by less than four cents per gallon in 2027, according to the federal government’s own Energy Information Administration (EIA). An economist recently analyzed the new data released by the EIA and you can find his results in this report.
 
Drilling’s proponents also claim that extraction from the Arctic Refuge can be done in an environmentally sensitive way. We have prepared a fact sheet that looks at the oil industry’s dismal track record in Alaska—and shows that drilling has already impacted the Arctic’s wild places in irreversible ways. You can download a copy here.
 
We believe that these missing pieces of essential information prove that the drilling in the Arctic Refuge is not worth the cost to future generations. Home to more than 200 species of wildlife, the Coastal Plain of the Arctic Refuge is one of our nation’s last, untouched wilderness places—and once it’s gone, it’s gone forever.

 You know, we don’t hear about this much in the Lower 48, however, there have been an average of 504 oil spills annually on Alaska’s North Slope since 1996.  Just something to consider.